Keystone Film Corporation produced what is reputed to be the world’s first feature-length comedy motion picture in 1914 with Tillie’s Punctured Romance, starring Marie Dressler, Charles Chaplin and Mabel Normand.

The film was a combination of stage-play adaptation and Keystone slapstick, with more punches and slaps thrown perhaps than in any other silent comedy.

Tillie, a simple farm girl, is enticed to run away to the city with her father’s money by Charlie, a city slicker con man. In the city, Tillie’s money is taken by Charlie until he reads of her impending inheritance of her uncle’s three-million dollar estate. — Carl Bennett

This quality edition has been mastered from the 35mm restoration positive of the 2004 cooperative restoration project between the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the British Film Institute, with additional digital restoration by Lobster Films, Paris. Conflated from incomplete prints held by world film archives, the resulting restoration print is good to excellent (mostly excellent), with numerous examples of frames missing from the very-good to excellent 35mm key source print now restored from other prints. On monitors that display the entire picture content on the DVD, edge to edge, the restored footage can often be spotted by differing framelines at the edges of the picture and a slight to significant difference in image quality. A spectacular job was performed by the UCLA restoration staff of digitally matching the geometry of the differing prints to minimize the potentially jarring transition from one print to another, to achieve as seamless (as possible) a presentation of the film’s total surviving footage.

The film is accompanied by an original music score performed by Ken Winokur (of The Alloy Orchestra) with the Tillie’s Nightmare, a five musician ensemble.

Now viewable with nearly all of its original footage, we highly recommend this presentation as the best available edition of Tillie’s Punctured Romance on home video.

For the video transfer, LaserLight utilized a very contrasty 16mm reduction print prepared by RAS Films in the 1960s. The reduction print was prepared from at least two different source materials, and features three different typefaces for the intertitles.

Highlights are blasted out much of the time and shadow detail lost in this substandard 16mm print. The transfer itself seems to have been adequately done and runs at the original camera speed of approximately 15-16 frames per second (FPS). What greytones remain in the image are grainy (the fault of the print) and are replete with compression artifacts (very difficult not to get with grainy, low-quality prints). The cropping of the picture image is tight (probably, again, the fault of the print), with heads sometimes cropped off at the top and proportionately more of the picture lost at the left. The film is a strain to watch much of the time. The print also features a soundtrack with hokey music and sound effects, and with a persistent narration of the story.

This edition is not worth the less-than-ten-dollars it can be had for.

This low-budget edition is nothing more than a 2002 Delta Entertainment repackaging of the remaining, unsold stock of the 1999 Laserlight edition. Since the only thing new about this Delta edition is its cardboard slipcover, its content is the exactly same as the Laserlight edition reviewed above.